Open Source Working Group Minutes RIPE 75

Wednesday 25 October 2017
WG Co-Chairs: Ondrej Filip and Martin Winter (Remotely)
Scribe: Alastair Strachan
Status: Draft

A. Administrative Matters - Ondrej Filip, WG Co Chair

Presentation is available here:
https://ripe75.ripe.net/archives/video/159/

Ondrej welcomed everyone and noted there were no agenda changes ahead of the meeting. The minutes from the last meeting were approved. There were no volunteers for another chairperson of this Working Group so both Ondrej and Martin would happily continue as chairs. There were no objections to this. There were no action points from the last meeting.

B. Knot Resolver - A Modern DNS Resolver

Petr Špaček, CZ.NIC

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe75.ripe.net/archives/video/159/

Jelte Janse, SIDN, asked if Lua interface exposes DSNSEC resolution results. He suggested they look at the code together as it would be too long to explain on the floor.

Saif Al Mashhad, CMC, asked if the software is compatible with BIND regarding its own transfer for authoritative DNS or if it was dotcom compatible.

Petr advised that this was a resolver so it doesn't do its own transfer but if the question was regarding the authoritative site, then yes, if the input transfer is RFC compliant, it will be accepted.

Saif had a follow-up question on whether the ccTLD was using this software.

Petr confirmed that the authoritative server is a different project which is called Knot DNS and the recursive server is called Knot Resolver.

Petr thanked Ondrej Sury who started the project and has now moved to ISC.

There were no other questions

C. Debian Packaging For Intermediates

Ondrej Sury, ISC

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe75.ripe.net/archives/video/162/

Joao Damas, speaking for himself, asked if it would be possible for Ondrej to put together a “Debian packages for dummies” tutorial as he finds it very complicated to understand.

Ondrej confirmed he would be happy for anyone to use his slides.

Joao then asked if it they could make the package work with system CT L&CO.

Ondrej replied that he has fixed some things but it is not a priority currently.


Gabriel, RIPE NCC, asked on behalf of Martin Winter (participating remotely), if there a better suggestion for a package across multiple Debian distributions.

Ondrej asked Martin to contact him directly to discuss this further.

Martin then asked how testing packages of code which are not directly involved.

Ondrej advised there were two ways, run the usual make check, or auto B kg test and that's an automated framework that's configured in the Debian directory.

Stefen Jakob, DENIC, suggested to build the code on a continuous base without SLAS manual interaction if possible.

Ondrej confirmed Deb Jenkins glue can set up the infrastructure for you to build Debian packages from Jenkins.

Tim Armstrong stated he would prefer system D no longer existed.

There were no other questions.

D. Anatomy of White-Box Switches

Alex Saroyan, XCloud Networks

The presentation is available at:
https://ripe75.ripe.net/archives/video/164/

Filippe Duke, Netassist, had a question about switches, in particular the monopoly of Broadcomm and Mallanox.

Alex confirmed from his experience he has had very few issues with ASIC from these manufactures and hoped there would be no bugs on the ASIC level.

Martin Winter asked Alex what his understanding was of Barefoot/Mellanox compared with Broadcomm who use strict NDAs to restrict certain features on their chips.

Alex said they have faced some issues and agreed Mellanox is more open from that perspective.

Stefan Jacob, DENIC, stated they had recently replaced Juniper security appliances with open source stuff and hopes would the community was putting more pressure of the lower levels so they have nice APIs and documentation.

Alex agreed but highlighted that it required effort from users and there were people who wanted to benefit from this but were not willing to put the time in.

Musallam AlFarsi, The Research Council, asked why open source hardware description language wasn’t used.

Alex answered that ASICs come with fixed functions and if these were changed to programmable chips it would drive the prices up. He did note that this is happening with barefoot networks.

No other questions were asked

E. Lightning Talks

The presentations can be found here:
https://ripe75.ripe.net/archives/video/167/

E1. Ondrej Sury - Bind 9.12 Highlights

Ondrej gave a talk regarding BIND 9.12 which has just been released. The final version should be available by end of year. He covered the new features of this build and asked for any feedback.

Joao Damas questioned the refactoring of BIND and if there had been any testing about what it does compared to what it used to do.

Ondrej mentioned there was a complex testing sweet and that his goal was to refactor more and remove code rather than add.

There were no other questions.

E2. Ondrej Filip – BIRD 2.0.0

Ondrej gave a short update on BIRD Routing Daemon. He explained the recent features of v1.6.3 highlighting it was a well-tested release. He added that they were working on new version 2.0.0 and hoped for a final release by the end of the year. He also asked for people to test this release to help with bugs and improvements.

Stefan DENIC, asked how software quality and security was assured.

Ondrej mentioned that many of their friends were exchange points so they help to highlight what should be tested, how to set up testing environments and other hints.  He also highlighted the conscious effort to slow down releases to make a more stable product.

Felippe Duke, NetAssist, asked if there were plans for better integration for NET NS in BIRD.

Ondrej confirmed he had not had any request for this from the community.

There were no other questions.